I walk to the edge of the pit and stare down. That’s why they were here last night. They were digging up weapons. The IRA has guns buried on farms all around here, mostly Kalashnikovs, some Makarovs, bought from criminal organizations in Eastern Europe. I look back across the field at the row of small cottages, mine in their center.
I wonder how long the cache was buried here, in view of my back window, how many times the herd of sheep flowing across the field passed over it, or lay on the grass above it. We often climb the hill at sunset. All those times, I was carrying my baby back and forth over an arms drop.
* * *
—
Tom is taking Finn to visit his parents in Donegal. These three days will be the longest we’ve been apart. I start packing a bag for him, feeling thwarted. He’s only six months old, Donegal’s too far away, I should never have agreed to this. Also, I like Tom’s parents, and their house in Ardara, near the mountains. It’s not fair that I never see them anymore, that all of those holidays and dinners meant nothing in the end.
I met Tom at a party. I was on the porch making a call when he came out for a cigarette, and we never ended up going back inside. I’d just started at the BBC, and I remember racing down the stairs every evening after work to where he was waiting for me. The weather was hot that summer, and we went to outdoor concerts, to beaches, to rooftop bars. He met Marian and my mam, and I met his friends at a beer garden, shy at first, and then laughing with his arm around my shoulders. We couldn’t get enough of each other. At parties we often ended up standing on the stairs or in a hallway, wanting to talk only to each other, to make each other laugh. We were married five years ago at his parents’ house, under a flowering pear tree.
Last summer, when I was two months pregnant with Finn, I found a lip balm in our car. Not a lipstick, a clear balm. It could have belonged to anyone. A few seconds later, Tom came jogging out of the house and climbed into the passenger seat. We were on our way to a friend’s birthday party. “Oh, I found this,” I said, and Tom’s face went white.
My first thought was that we were going to be late for the birthday party. For a moment, that seemed as serious a problem as his infidelity. Then the pain came, and kept coming.
“Who is she?”
“Briony.” They worked together, I’d met her at his office once. She’d seemed nice.
Tom promised to end it. He said he’d been nervous about becoming a father, that he hated feeling old. Then later, in a different voice, he said, “You were always working.”
“So were you,” I said, though it then occurred to me that he might not have been spending all of those hours at the office.
I wanted to return to the summer we met and tell Tom what he’d done. He would have been heartbroken. But he’d also changed. He’d become less political, less curious, less open-minded. He’d started to care about different things. Money, essentially. Comfort. He said he didn’t want to live like a student anymore.
And he was right, not that I’d been working more, but that we’d been spending less time together. He’d stopped wanting to go to certain concerts or exhibitions or parties, so I’d been going alone, or with friends.
The trouble wasn’t his infidelity, exactly, but how it had proven the limit of his love. He’d said, more than once, that he’d do anything for me, and now I knew that wasn’t true, and I’d never be able to unknow it.
At some point, Tom asked if we could move past it, and I said yes. I was two months pregnant, a divorce was unthinkable.
“We’re staying together,” I told Marian.
After a long pause, she said, “Is that what you want?”
“We’re having a baby. I’m not repeating what our parents did.”
When I was two and Marian was an infant, our father went to London to work on a building site. At first, he sent back letters and money, and then, very slowly, he stopped. He never came back.
He’s rich now. He started a bricklaying firm with two of the other men from the building site, which became hugely successful, and he lives in Twickenham with his second wife and three sons.
I had lunch with him a few years ago when I was in London for work. He was late, which enraged me. I ordered the most expensive glass of wine on the menu, then another, and another. I was annoyed with him for choosing such an expensive restaurant. Even after he became wealthy, our father paid our mother only a tiny sum of child support.
I watched him enter the restaurant, this man with bristling silver hair and a tailored suit, greeting the host and waiter in his rolling Belfast accent. The staff all seemed to think he was a nice man, and I wanted to correct them.